9 August 2022. Attackers compromised the DNS records for curve.fi and pointed the domain at a cloned copy of the site running on their own infrastructure.
The clone looked correct. It prompted visitors to approve a malicious contract. Around $575,000 was drained from the people who did, routed out through centralised exchanges and a mixer.
Curve's smart contracts were never touched. A second front end on a different DNS provider, curve.exchange, was completely unaffected.
So: the decentralised part of the decentralised exchange worked perfectly, and was never involved.
What failed was a domain name record held at a registrar. A centralised dependency with a login, a password reset, and a support desk, sitting directly in front of contracts that have none of those things.
Users reached the protocol through the one component that could be taken over, because it is the only route anybody is ever shown.
The two venue types are usually presented as a values choice, with one side arguing convenience and the other arguing principle. That framing is not useful, and it obscures the fact that both types have a centralised layer and the layers fail differently.
Five axes
Who holds the asset. A centralised exchange holds it and you have a claim, which is F103-03. A decentralised exchange never holds it: you sign, the contract executes, the asset moves between your wallet and a pool.
Whether identity is required. Centralised venues require it almost everywhere, which is a legal requirement rather than a business preference, and which creates the data that leaked in F106-04. Decentralised venues generally do not, at the protocol level.
Who decides what is listed. A centralised venue curates, which filters some fraud and also means an asset can be delisted without your consent. Anybody can create a market on a decentralised venue, which means everything is available including the things in F101-05's autopsy.
Whether anything is reversible. A centralised venue can freeze, reverse and reimburse, and sometimes does. A decentralised venue cannot, ever, by anybody.
What the failure mode is. This is the one that matters most and the one nobody compares.
The failure modes are opposites
A centralised venue fails slowly, legally and partially. The course autopsy is FTX: withdrawals halted, bankruptcy three days later, and a process that ran for two years and paid out. Mt. Gox is F107-04 and took a decade. Painful, protracted, and rarely zero.
A decentralised venue fails instantly and totally. You sign a transaction and it settles. There is no queue, no trustee, no claim form. The Curve victims lost their funds in the seconds after approving.
Which produces the honest summary: a centralised venue puts your assets at risk of somebody else's decisions, and a decentralised venue puts them at risk of your own. F103-03 said the same thing about custody and it is the same trade appearing again one layer up.
What is centralised about a decentralised exchange
The word describes the settlement layer. It does not describe the stack you actually touch.
The domain name. Held at a registrar, with an account, protected by whatever that account's security is. This is the autopsy.
The hosting and the front end. A web server serving JavaScript, which can be replaced.
The front end's dependencies. Every library it imports, and every library those import. F104-01's Connect Kit attack is this exact layer, and it hit the front ends of several major protocols at once.
The RPC provider. F101-04's whole lesson. Your transaction reaches the chain through somebody's infrastructure.
Upgrade keys. Many protocols retain an ability to change their own contracts. F101-03's chokepoint question applies directly, and the answer varies by protocol and changes over time.
Only the settlement is decentralised. Everything between you and it is ordinary web infrastructure with ordinary web failure modes.
The practical instruction that falls out of the autopsy, and it takes one minute.
Verify the correct address once, from the protocol's own documentation or repository. Bookmark it. Reach it only through that bookmark, never through a search result, a link, or an advertisement.
Then note the fallback. Curve's users had a working alternative on a different DNS provider the entire time and most of them did not know it existed. If a protocol publishes a second front end, or an interface reachable without DNS at all, write it down next to the bookmark.
And when a front end behaves unexpectedly, asking for an approval you did not initiate or one that looks unfamiliar, stop. That is the shape both the Curve and Connect Kit victims saw, and it is the only warning either group got.
Choosing for a purpose
Fiat on-ramp and off-ramp. Centralised, necessarily. This is the only place most people can convert to and from bank money, and it is the reason F102-02's permissionless claim is conditional at both ends.
Buying a major asset. Either. Centralised is usually cheaper and simpler for a beginner, and F107-05 shows the cost is less obvious than the fee schedule suggests.
Anything not listed on a major venue. Decentralised, by necessity, with the risks of F101-05 fully engaged: read the contract, check the holders, confirm you can sell.
Holding. Neither. F103-03 settled this. A venue is somewhere you transact, not somewhere you keep things, and the balance you leave there is a claim you have chosen to hold.
A decentralised exchange is the safer choice because nobody can take my funds.
Half true in a way that gets people hurt, because the half that is true is the half people already believe.
Nobody can take your funds from custody, correctly, and that is real: no DEX halted withdrawals in November 2022 and no DEX depositor waited a decade for a trustee. That property is not available anywhere else.
What a decentralised venue removes is the counterparty. What it does not remove, and in fact concentrates entirely onto you, is authorisation risk. You approve, and it is done. The Curve users were not robbed by a custodian; they signed. F105 exists because that is now the dominant way people lose money, and F106-01's taxonomy puts the conversational and authorisation families far ahead of custodial failure by frequency.
There is a second thing missing, and it is the one beginners underestimate. A centralised venue absorbs your mistakes. Wrong network, wrong amount, wrong address: sometimes recoverable, because a human can be asked. On-chain, a mistake settles.
So the accurate statement is not that one is safer. It is that a decentralised venue removes the risk you cannot control and adds the risk you can, which is only an improvement if you have done the work in F105 and F106.
Compare venues on five axes: who holds the asset, whether identity is required, who decides what is listed, whether anything is reversible, and how it fails. The failure modes are opposites, with centralised venues failing slowly and partially and decentralised ones failing instantly and totally at the moment you sign. And "decentralised" describes the settlement layer only: the domain, the hosting, the front-end dependencies, the RPC provider and often an upgrade key are all ordinary centralised infrastructure, which is why $575,000 left Curve's users through a DNS record while the contracts were untouched. Reach protocols through a bookmark you verified once, note the fallback front end, and remember that a venue is somewhere you transact rather than somewhere you keep things.